Talk:Wikipedia/Activity

This is an article?

Wow. Is this an encyclopedia article or an op-ed? —Tom Morris (talk) 21:24, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

I think it should be a subpage of Wikipedia or incorporated into that article. As it stands, it's clearly not an article in its own right, and that's before we get into any other issues with it. John Stephenson 21:14, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

That was my thought too. Peter Jackson 15:29, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

I'll vote for that. Ro Thorpe 18:45, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, /Addendum might be possible, or an article-specific subpage perhaps called '/Activity'. John Stephenson 16:26, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I like /Activity. Of course that would mean that the article would have to also include information from 2001-2005, but this being a wiki that can be done at anytime. James Yolkowski 21:44, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

The novelty has worn off, and there are little or no new worlds to conquer

Is the point at which something is ready to be finished the point at which it is no longer interesting?

"To conceive and idea is noble; to execute the work is servile." Leonardo da Vinci. Robert A. Estremo 03:04, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, I find the edits I do there are almost always niggles of one kind or another these days. Ro Thorpe 18:45, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

From my monitoring of a fair number of articles, it seems to me that much editing these days is defensive, that is, undoing vandalism. There are several articles that I know of that could do with a raising of standard, but this hardly ever gets done. In the past I have done wholesale revisions of a couple of these, but I do not undertake that now.--Martin Wyatt 11:35, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

The majority of the articles I track have actually degraded in quality as they are either a) peppered with long standing "citation needed" tags, b) filled with vague comments regarding how the article should be improved in some form of fashion but expecting that work to be done by "others," c) laced with dubious "facts" (outright errors), or d) feature some combination of a, b, and c. I no longer waste my time trying to make reasonable revisions to WP articles. Robert A. Estremo 14:32, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

And sometimes e) biased selection and/or presentation of material. Peter Jackson 17:27, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

←My recent experience on WP is that it has lost its way entirely, and Talk page discussion has degenerated into me-too affirmations of cliquish views of material with no regard for sources. The upshot is that substantive contributors to WP articles are very scarce and most editors content themselves with sound-bite enforcement of the existing text and running scared of any substantial addition that might involve looking at sources. John R. Brews 15:39, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Proposed explanations

The proposed explanations in this section are all speculation, and in my own opinion, are lame, provinding various insubstantial excuses for Wikipedians to ignore the data.

(i) decline is a symptom of Wikipedia's success. An exponentially rising phenomena naturally rolls off eventually in a sigmoid curve. It does not abruptly reverse slope.

(ii) culture and infrastructure have become more closed and less accepting of new users over time. True. But, again, a gradual increase in barriers to contribution does not explain an abrupt reversal in activity.

(iii) long-term editors are being driven off by excessive conflict and friction. While this statement is entirely factual, IMO, it also does not explain the suddenness of change.

(iv) many more things to do on the Internet. Again, undeniable, but cannot explain a sudden reversal.

These speculations distract from purpose of the article, which is intended to present simply some factual data. There is no need to present various half-baked theories. John R. Brews 16:38, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I would tend to disagree. First of all, there are published papers examining the first two hypotheses (see further reading for a link to one and an abstract of another), so some of these ideas are not "half-baked". Second, these ideas are discussed a lot on various WMF projects, so it seems reasonable to document what ideas are being discussed. Third, if we accepted your assertion, we would also need to rewrite the lead paragraph to remove any mention of Sue Gardner.

You assert that the first two ideas do not explain the decline in activity. You are correct that, in themselves, they do not. However, they could explain the decline in conjunction with another factor that is briefly mentioned in the article but that I was unable to describe in detail due to lack of relevant knowledge. That factor is that, for the most part, people's interest in online communities only lasts so long. After around 18 months or so, people move on to other online communities. I have seen different values for this number, such as 9 months or 36 months. Anyway, if you have a declining number of new users, the sort of natural attrition described above will ensure that the net number of contributors/contributions begins to shrink after a short while. (As a totally irrelevant aside, this of course means that any project that wants to survive needs to continually attract new users in order to make up for this sort of natural attrition, which unfortunately CZ doesn't seem to currently be doing a good job of.) If someone drops by who knows a lot more about this factor than I do, it would be nice to mention something about this in the article. Cheers, James Yolkowski 22:02, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

James: Thanks for your interest. Models of the processes you describe suggest a sigmoid behavior that leads to an ultimate saturation. Perhaps one could argue that these graphs are a derivative of such a function. So far as this article is concerned, I don't think that any arguments to explain the data attempt anything more than throwing around hypotheses. They don't try to fit any statistical model to the behavior.

Speaking in that same vein of unsupported speculation, let's look at new article production. I'd guess that while one might think that the number of topics is finite and so naturally the number of new articles would taper off over time, an equally plausible conjecture is that large articles would be broken out into sub-topics over time. So, for instance, the article 'philosophy' would split into articles on sub-fields, and those into sub-sub-fields and so forth. However, a look at history pages shows that almost all these articles were written early in WP's history, even as early as 2004, and many in the 2006-2007 time frame, and nothing has happened since. Why is that? The answer is primarily this: most of the philosophers who wrote those pages left the project. Although changes continue, they are nearly entirely minor adjustments of a few hundred characters or less. There also is a tendency seen on Talk pages for argument rather than development.

In my opinion, which is admittedly not neutral, the experience by Philip Roth in the New Yorker and earlier by Messer-Kruse in the Chronicle of Higher Education is pretty typical. Roth was told that his own opinion about his personal inspiration for one of his books (which conflicted with WP) was not acceptable as a source on WP. Messer-Kruse was told that his scholarly publications about the Haymarket Riots were only 'primary sources' and didn't qualify for WP's version (which contradicted the historical record). It was interesting to see WP grudgingly adopt some changes in response to public humiliation. The lesson is that you may be able to get changes made if you have access to public media, but even then there will be no general policy assessment, but only 'just enough' change to the specific complaints about content. John R. Brews 18:31, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

In another ridiculous example, the WP article on the U.S.S. Constitution (even as of this writing) fails to mention that the ship is the ony United States Naval Vessel without a hull number. On a number of occasions wherein a statement regarding the same is placed in the article, it has been quickly removed as "original research" even though this is the official stance of the Navy and of the Constitution Museum. Robert A. Estremo 19:12, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Robert: It would seem that one speculation about the events on WP is simply this: the data shows the environment underwent a rapid upsurge in Administrator population and so-called 'active' editors in the 2006-07 time frame, and this coincided with an adverse change in contributors' interest in participation. To put things in dramatic terms, there was a 'take-over' of WP. John R. Brews 16:02, 17 July 2013 (UTC)